Passionate about IP! Since June 2003 the IPKat has covered copyright, patent, trade mark, info-tech, privacy and confidentiality issues from a mainly UK and European perspective. The team is Neil J. Wilkof, Annsley Merelle Ward, Darren Smyth, Nicola Searle, Eleonora Rosati, David Brophy, Alberto Bellan and Merpel, with contributions from Mark Schweizer. You're welcome to read, post comments and participate. You can email the Kats here

From October 2016 to March 2017 the team is joined by Guest Kats Rosie Burbidge and Eibhlin Vardy, and by InternKats Verónica Rodríguez Arguijo, Tian Lu and Hayleigh Bosher.

Tuesday, 21 August 2012

The latest issue of the World Intellectual Property Organization's WIPO Magazine is now available online. You can access it in all its glory here. With impeccable timing, there's an article entitled "A glimpse into the future of paralympic sports", which focuses on some of the remarkable technological innovations which enable disabled athletes to compete against each other and, in some cases, athletes who perform without any impairment. This Kat is not a great admirer of the Olympic Games, at least in its current manifestation, but he welcomes the benefits which R&D bring to those who are in need of assistance. Another article of interest, but of a very different nature, is "Managing performers' rights: the role of contracts" by Katherine Sand, Former General Secretary of the International Federation of Actors (FIA). Though less serious than physical and mental impairments, legal impairments can blight a performer's career and financial stability. It's good to know of the work done by WIPO in cooperation with performers' organisations to protect performers both from themselves and the not infrequent rapacity of others, though this Kat worries that solving contractual issues is a job that is easier to start than to complete.

The Patent Lawyer Magazine, as PatLit announced last night, is just about to be launched on a largely unsuspecting world. Its home site is hereand the pilot issue is here. Publishers Legal Business Media have obviously spent a good deal of thought, time, money and effort in trying to determine what, apart from Angelina Jolie, might appeal to members of the patent practitioner fraternity. Now that there is no longer any Patent World, it is safe for The Patent Law Magazine to peel itself off the drawing board and enter the market in the knowledge that there is no title with a name with which it will be instantly confused. The new title is scheduled to come out bimonthly, which is probably a subtle way of avoiding having to have a "Troll of the Month" feature. This Kat, who is busily angling for a complementary subscription, is sure that it will become a "must-read" along with the other IP glossies and wishes it well.

Volume 9, Issue 2, of SCRIPTEDSCRIPT-EdScripted scripted is now available in full online. You can enjoy it here. There's agreat piece by Vasileios Karagiannopoulos ("China and the Internet: Expanding on Lessig’s Regulation Nightmares") which leaves this Kat wondering whether, in years to come, the two superpowers slugging it out for control of the internet will be China and, er, Google. The abstract concludes with the following: "The ultimate goal of this paper is to demonstrate how China might be formulating its own model of Internet governance and how this model might be gaining more power, becoming capable of eliminating, controlling or co-opting any serious challenges to it from internal and external influences". Also worth a Katpat is "Relationships Between Patent Claim Terms and Competitiveness in Lawsuits" by Takashi Miyazawa*and Hiroshi Osada,here. This article seeks to show that

"On the whole, patent claims which have fewer terms functioning as limitations on the patent claims are advantageous in patent infringement lawsuits. Moreover, among patent claims that have more terms functioning as limitations of the patent claims, those which have more words specifying the relationships between the terms are more likely to be successful in lawsuits".

While this Kat, as a patent enthusiast, would have guessed the outcome, as a lover of words and ways of both analysing and commoditising them he found the methodology quite gripping.

The September issue of Sweet & Maxwell's European Intellectual Property Review (EIPR) offers all sorts of delights for the IP theoretician, having been almost completely taken over by contributors from academe. Although the title is long and quite tough to get through, Petroula Vantsiouri's "A Legislation in Bits and Pieces: the Overlapping Anti-Circumvention Provisions of the Information Society Directive, the Software Directive and the Conditional Access Directive, and their Implementation in the United Kingdom" reflects and expresses a number of sentiments with which this Kat wholeheartedly agrees.

1 comment:

With reference to the scripted article that mentions claims with more words specifying the relationship between limitations being successful in lawsuits, it might be because such claims are simply better drafted, probably by an attorney who has managed to see the invention at a deeper level, so that he/she can express the inter-relationships between the features

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